daytender .31 released

Mainly addressing bug fixes from user requests, fixed the social page which now loads again.  Pop up there and answer the question before it rolls over on Monday.

By request, we've also changed the regular email to have a direct link into the DailyMirror.  Enjoy!

The friendly folks at daytender.

.30 Released - New Social Page

Back when we first launched, we released a placeholder for the social section, but it didn't really have anything there.  We noticed that some users would come throughout the week just to check the social page.  It helped us realize that the idea was interesting and a draw for people, but we just didn't have anything there.  So, we ripped it out and began planning new stuff.

Now, a few months later, we're happy to re-launch the new social page.  It has a wall for users to share with each other, a question of the week, some playfulness around usage data, and pointers to who comes to the site.

The goal of the social section is to interact with like-minded people in positive, uplifting, and goal-centered ways. Please let us know how to improve it, and please help make the page a community of the types of interactions that you most want to see.

One thing that you might notice.  Today, there are tons of users with the automatically assigned usernames, which are just a string of numbers.  I highly recommend customizing your user name for interacting with others on the site.

Another new addition, a motivation quote of the week shows up on the dashboard.  Keep coming back to check it out.

Keep being awesome.
daytender

.28 Released

In this latest version we've added a whole new Resources page featuring tons of content to links that are motivating and valuable, we also bring in a lot of improvement and consistency around cross-browser support including clickable emotions wheel for non-Chrome browsers, and we've improved pop-ups quite a bit.

Behind the scenes, we've also made some changes to our admin interface to let us better keep track of and respond to user comments, stars, and errors that people hit on the site.  Now that the site's user base is growing, it's important for us to stay on top of what people are telling us.

During this upgrade, we had a database malfunction, and we accidentally lost settings for email notifications.  Some people may need to turn their settings off again.  We're not sure how it happened, and we really apologize for the mix up.

The next release is on track to bring in some new social features so that you can interact with other users in more ways than just the comments.

Keep sending us your comments and ratings so that we can keep tweaking the site to your liking.

Thanks from the Stark Raving Bits.

daytender
It's habit forming.

We goofed! Users rejoice!

I made a mistake late last night that leaked some new features to daytender.com before we were ready.  It has some important things in it:

1. Much slicker popup experiences in a few places, especially around feedback
2. The emotions wheel in the Daily Mirror is now clickable.  Click on an emotion to insert it into your write-up.  Several people asked for this, now you have it!
3. Communication mails - There's now a setting in your profile to receive (infrequent) notification mailings.  This is separate from daily mailings, so you now have more fine-grained control.

You might wonder how this mistake happened, so here's a peek under the covers.  We keep 2 versions of the site: staging and production.  On Staging, we test the changes amongst the members of Stark Raving Bits to ensure that they're ready to go live. Production is what everyone else sees, and we try to make the code as rock solid as possible on staging before we push to production.  If you ever wonder why you don't see as much from Dean, Scott, and Ed on daytender.com, it's because we use the staging site as our daily fix while ironing out as many kinks as possible.  I mistakenly pushed to production instead of staging last night when celebrating a challenging bug fix.


The good news, the oops seems to work really well, so we'll keep it live.  You get some new features even earlier than we intended.  Enjoy, and please let us know what you think.


daytender
It's habit forming.

.26 released on 3/5 - Visual enhancements

We're experimenting with iterating faster to bring you changes as we have them.  This release comes just 6 days after the release of .25.  We have 3 themes to this release:

1. Visual improvements - We tightened up the dashboard, New font and updated logo, consistent colors, custom error messages (if you hit a page error)
2. It's easier for you to know when the admin got back to one of your comments, if you have emails turned on. 
3. Improved statistics - We brought back a visualization of the time spent on DailyMirror, now as a sparkline.  Additionally, all ratings on the site now show as stars instead of text. Over time you will see more use of sparklines and tighter data visualizations.

Behind the scenes we upgraded to faster, more reliable server software, though you likely won't see much of that. Stay tuned for more fun stuff that's in the works.  We should have another release coming very shortly.  

Oh, and you might not have seen the new email format because of a bug that we had, it was only sending to a small fraction of our users.  Click this link to turn emails back on.  It's a simple 1-click from the new mail to turn them back off if you don't find them valuable, so give it a shot!

Cheers from the folks at daytender.

.25 released, bringing email enhancements

You might want to turn the emails back on.

Many people told us that our previous emails were harassments that didn't add any value.  We completely redesigned those to help keep you in touch with what's going on on the site, and as you use DailyMirror, the system will remind you of your plans and serve as a useful record for you.

Click this link to turn emails back on.  It's a simple 1-click from the new mail to turn them back off, so give it a shot!

Before and After

Check out these before and after shots to get an idea for the changes that we've made in this release of daytender.

The signin page is more attractive and themes our site better.  Don't you just want to come on in?  The first time user experience is now very streamlined to make the first experience minimallyintrusive.

The dashboard has tons of new stuff, include user stats and word clouds.

 The DailyMirror intro is now a lot more relaxing as you prepare to enter this important part of your day.

 The feedback popup now separates ratings from comments, has a graphical rating interface, and accepts multiple comments.  There's a ton more that we've done to make it even easier to provide feedback.